Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement reviews

The number of customers it can handle is surprising, justifying its price. It also allows you to measure the results of each marketing campaign. In the long run it reduces costs to acquire new customers.

The cost makes it an unviable option for small and medium-sized companies, even with the most economical plan. It is a slightly complex software, so it requires qualified personnel.

Easy to send emails and track activity. Reporting is very easy with all important data right on the dashboard and on the campaign canvas.

Possibly, templates can be created and WYSIWYG editor used, but we programmed emails in html, which was really time consuming.

I like that you can create renderings and very interactively build emails.

It can be very complex to do little tasks, like adding in a photo. Not to mention if you want to change the template, you need to have CSS/HTML background.

User friendly interfaceMultiple lead management optionsReports were easily generated and saved without any issues

If the information was captured wrong due to some reason, debugging took timeInitially learning curve difficult

This can be a good tool to use for automation as you can import contacts and add them to lists and drips fairly easily. It's also good for integrating with custom forms and landing pages and you can create custom campaigns, links etc. High level, it really helps connect everything together from the first visit (including the pages they viewed) and every subsequent touchpoint from then on (but reporting on this falls into the "Cons").

Pardot is a difficult tool to set up and manage and their support through the process is quite limited. Their chat seems to fill up by 9 am, and although they offer courses to train you how to use their product, they charge for it. Although it is a powerful tool, their reporting capabilities are very behind, and while they capture every touchpoint, there is no way to roll up that data to gather insights or report on it.

Pardot is one of the better marketing automation/nurturing product aimed at mid-sized businesses. It's greatest strength is its integration with Salesforce (which will be discussed more in "cons"). With relative simplicity, it can be connected to the CRM, so that contacts can easily sync two-ways, and even custom objects can be brought through for segmentation purposes with just a couple of clicks.

Tracking and automation is very well thought out and easy to use. The product has a straightforward method of tracking campaign results and attribution, all of which can then be pushed into Salesforce for comprehensive reporting on prospect-to-purchase management and measurement.

Pardot's greatest strength lies in its ease of use. No marketing automation software is going to be SIMPLE, but Pardot shines in the consistency between its many functions. Nothing feels tacked-on or different from other tools. If you can create a campaign, you can create a complex segmentation rule, and you can manage your social media posts, as it all works identically.

The marketing automation function, Engagement Studio, has gone through substantial recent updates and I consider it best-in-class for ease of use and functionality. If true automation is your #1 concern, this is a great choice.

Lastly, support is excellent. Salesforce Trailblazer is fantastic for self-guided-training, the documentation is up-to-date and accurate, and support tickets are answered promptly and knowledgeably. If you are experienced in systems of these sorts, you will quite likely not need to take advantage of any external training (or SF's accelerator options).

Pardot is a Salesforce product, and its integration is excellent, but it is just that - an integration. Pardot works like a third party service connected with Salesforce, as opposed to a native extension. Lists are synchronized, along with the sort of bugs and frustrations that come with bi-directional synchronization, and some Salesforce functions (notably custom objects) are not as fully fleshed out as one might hope. In some ways, other solutions do a better job synchronizing with Salesforce. That said, Pardot's setup is the simplest I've used, and having unified support for CRM and marketing automation is also a tremendous advantage when I do run into any hang-ups.

Also, while Pardot's feature set is great, some of its tools are in need of substantial upgrades to keep up with the competition. Its WYSIWYG email and landing page tools aren't responsive and are far outclassed in ease of use by Mailchimp and other lower cost options (although if you're comfortable with HTML and developing your own templates, it's not bad at all). It is progressively being updated and modernized, but it obviously takes time, and there can be minor frustrations when you see other tools that are smoother or more approachable. But I have never found this to set a limit on what's possible, only an opportunity for things to be faster and easier for less-expert users.

1) it's a really robust marketing automation platform with lots of capabilities but wrapped around a super easy UI
2) deep integration within the salesforce CRM and echo system (you can also use 3rd party salesforce tools from the app exchange to trigger things such as SMS via the SFDC campaign function )
3) slick customer journey canvas that is highly visual
4) fairly priced (in comparison with the other MA vendors)

1) only works with Salesforce (professional edition and above ) so if you're using a different CRM that wont really work for you, or rather be a standalone
2) it would be great if there were more native connectors to it.

As a small non profit, being able to have a tool with a lot of automation enables us to be a lot more efficient in terms of marketing campaigns, news letter management, and integrated forms with our CRM and analytics. Our productivity would not be as high as an organization without Pardot as a tool.

The Salesforce - Pardot integration can be very finicky and requires a lot of maintenance to ensure it's working properly. For instance, we are having issues reading opportunities and have been back and forth with the customer support team to figure out to resolve the issue for 2 weeks now

I love the ability to have insight into customer activity and to create marketing campaigns. From a marketing perspective Pardot is an amazing tool. However my role is in more of a sales role so I tend to lean on the features of Salesforce much more. I appreciate the tie into sales force and how I am able to create reports and customer lists very easily in Pardot. It has greatly expanded the communication that I am able to have with customers. I work closely with the marketing team to delivery targeted messages which we were unable to do in the past.

My biggest frustration comes from the Salesforce/Pardot relationship. I wish that the terms in salesforce were the same used in Pardot, it is a bit of a learning curve especially when you are getting up to speed and working within two different departments. For example campaigns in salesforce are completely different than campaigns in Pardot.

Easy to set up and use. Many customization options and high quality.

Suppot is a bit cumbersome and takes too long.

I liked that it was an all-in-one tool and building workflows was very easy.

The customer service was subpar. We had a fairly substantial $25k contract and still did not have access to any telephone support. We could only use chat support and their chat was often unavailable. This was the primary reason we ended up transitioning to a new product.

The software is solid, reliable and the feature set covers all I have needed so far in my marketing and lead generation. I use it primarily for forms, lead capture, email newsletters, drip funnels and lead scoring.
The close integration with Salesforce means the sales team can answer their own questions and see what we are doing with leads.

The companies I work with that use Pardot are mid-size. Their use is as much about future proofing their systems as its features. However, for smaller companies, it would suggest that it is too expensive for their immediate needs.
The interface can be complicated but that is due to the big feature set. If you have used other marketing automation software you can use this easily.